Where LAX Hides Its Shops, and What's in Your Terminal

LAX has 86 shops in its retail directory, seven of them in the closed Terminal 5, and 37 of the rest in one building. Tom Bradley and its West Gates extension hold 43 percent of the airport’s stores, which is a problem if you’re flying Southwest out of Terminal 1 or American out of Terminal 4, because you can’t get there.

Here’s the count for all ten:

Terminal	Shops
Tom Bradley	26
Bradley West Gates	11
Terminal 6	9
Terminal 1	8
Terminal 2	6
Terminal 4	6
Terminal 7	6
Terminal 3	5
Terminal 8	2
Terminal 5	0 — closed

Terminal 8 has two shops. Both sell magazines.

What’s actually in your terminal?

Terminal 1 is the strongest of the domestic terminals for browsing, with eight: SOL Surf, Kiehl’s, MAC Cosmetics, Brookstone, I Love L.A., two New Stand locations and a Hudson at arrivals. SOL Surf is the one you can’t get anywhere else — a California surf shop in the Southwest terminal, which is either perfect or absurd depending on your mood.

Terminal 2 has six, and Larchmont Jct at Gates 20 and 21 is the pick. It’s named after a Los Angeles street and stocks like it. There’s also a DFS Duty Free, SPANX, InMotion, Univision and a CNBC Smartshop.

Terminal 3 has five, and the useful one isn’t a shop in the usual sense: Gameway near Gate 33 is a video-gaming lounge. Hudson Nonstop near Gate 36 is the Amazon walk-out-without-paying format. EVOLVE by Hudson carries local-artisan goods.

Terminal 4 has six, all news, books and candy plus a DFS Duty Free. Nothing here justifies a walk.

Terminal 5 is closed. It had seven shops and they were the most Los Angeles of the lot — Magic Johnson Sports, FAO Schwarz, I Love L.A., Rip Curl, an LA Times newsstand, a Hollywood Reporter and a DFS — but the terminal stopped handling passengers on 28 October 2025 and was demolished. All seven went with it. The Terminal 5 page has the detail and says which terminal each of its airlines uses now.

Terminal 6 has nine, the most of any domestic terminal. M.Fredric is a California clothing chain, MARKET 8600 is the convenience concept, and there’s a MAC, a See’s Candies, a Belkin and a DFS.

Terminal 7 has six and one of them is worth planning around. Book Soup is the Sunset Boulevard bookstore, and its LAX outpost is a real bookshop rather than an airport bestseller rack. Bartel’s Harley Davidson is next door in spirit, and Hugo Boss covers the “I forgot a jacket” case.

Terminal 8 has People News and E! Entertainment. That’s the list.

Tom Bradley has 26, and it’s a different category of retail — Cartier, Bvlgari, Hermès, Gucci, Burberry, TUMI, Victoria’s Secret and Hugo Boss, most of them clustered in the Great Hall around the luxury island. We covered that terminal on its own in the Bradley shopping guide.

The West Gates add 11 more, and they’re the newest and the most interesting: AllSaints, LEGO, Jocale, POP SOX, Wilshire & Fairfax, Pier Provisions, New Beauty.

The pattern: six duty frees and a lot of newsstands

DFS Duty Free appears in six of the ten terminals. Hudson, in one branding or another, appears in at least five. If you strip out duty free, news, and books, LAX’s 86 shops come down to maybe two dozen distinct retail ideas repeated across a very large airport.

That’s not a criticism so much as an operating reality — airport retail is a concession business and the concessionaires that win bid everywhere. But it does change how you should think about a layover. The question isn’t “what can I buy at LAX,” it’s “what can I buy in this terminal that isn’t in the next one.”

By that measure the answers are short: Book Soup (T7), SOL Surf (T1), Larchmont Jct (T2), Gameway (T3), M.Fredric (T6), the luxury island (Bradley), AllSaints and LEGO (West Gates). Magic Johnson Sports and FAO Schwarz used to belong on that list; they were in Terminal 5.

The shops-per-restaurant test

One way to read a terminal is the ratio of shops to restaurants, because it tells you what the terminal expects you to do with your time.

Tom Bradley runs 26 shops against 20 restaurants — a browsing terminal, built around a long international dwell time and a duty-free allowance. Terminal 8 runs 2 shops against 4 restaurants. Terminal 1 is 8 against 13, Terminal 6 is 9 against 12, and Terminal 4 is 6 against 3, the only domestic terminal at LAX where the shops outnumber the food.

None of that is an accident. International departures sit airside for two hours or more; a Southwest passenger in Terminal 1 is through the door and onto the plane. The retail follows the dwell time, which is why the terminal with the longest waits has the most to look at.

Can you walk to the good stuff?

Sometimes. LAX’s terminals fall into airside groups, and whether you can reach Bradley without re-clearing security depends on which terminal you started in — the terminal transfer guide has the specifics, and it’s the thing to check before you commit to a walk.

The rough version: if you’re in the Terminal 4 through 8 group, Bradley’s 37 shops are potentially reachable. If you’re in Terminals 1 through 3, they’re mostly not, and your realistic universe is the 19 shops across those three buildings.

Two practical notes

Almost all of this is past security. Three listings in the directory sit landside — a Hudson at Terminal 1 arrivals, a Hudson at Bradley ticketing, and Access Hollywood at Terminal 6 arrivals — so if you’re meeting someone at LAX, there is essentially nothing to do but wait.

And airport retail rotates. A concession that was in the directory last quarter may have been replaced this quarter, and a few listings carry closure notes that outlive the closure. Treat the counts above as the shape of the airport rather than a live inventory, and check the LAX terminal pages for the current layout before you plan a walk around a single store.

If you’re deciding between killing time shopping or eating, the food distribution at LAX is a lot more even than the retail — 97 restaurants spread far more sensibly across the ten terminals than 86 shops do.